{"id":753,"date":"2010-06-02T21:37:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-02T21:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=753"},"modified":"2010-06-02T21:46:29","modified_gmt":"2010-06-02T21:46:29","slug":"how-to-pick-the-right-channel-for-your-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/06\/02\/how-to-pick-the-right-channel-for-your-wi-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"How to pick the right channel for your Wi-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I\u2019ve noticed a few more wireless networks crop up near my place, so I\u2019ve been meaning to check I\u2019m still on the right channel.\u00a0 Seeing as I was doing the checks I thought it might be useful to write a few notes on what to check for.<\/p>\n

First a little technical background\u2026 Wi-Fi networks all operate in the same 2.4GHz band of the spectrum.\u00a0 To allow many networks to work within the same vicinity the range is broken down into a number of channels (11 in the US and 13 in Europe).\u00a0 Think of these as the frequencies of radio stations, each has a discreet band of its own.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you set up your Wi-Fi network your router or access point will be set to use one of these channels.\u00a0 That sounds great eh?\u00a0 Unfortunately, as you can see from the diagram above, to squeeze in enough channels many of them overlap.\u00a0 What that means in practice is that if your network is on a channel that overlaps with your neighbours both of you will probably suffer reduced performance.<\/p>\n

To get around this problem, you can check what channels are being used around you and set your network to one that has the most clear signal.<\/p>\n

The easiest way of doing this is to download a Wi-Fi monitoring tool and use that to analyse the surrounding networks.\u00a0 I\u2019ve used inSSIDer<\/a> from Metageek<\/a> before as it gives you a nice graph which helps visualise the networks.\u00a0 So in the screenshot below you can see that the orange network is set to channel 6 (the mid-point of the range), but that the dotted yellow network is set to channel 9 and overlaps it slightly.\u00a0 Setting the orange network to channel 1 would move it out of the interference of the other networks, and should therefore speed it up.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re having problems with your network it\u2019s worth trying this out and seeing how the networks around you could be affecting yours.\u00a0 You can usually set the channel for your network within the control panel for your wireless access point or router.\u00a0 Give it a go and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wireless networks have an assigned channel. These 802.11 wi-fi channels overlap so picking the right one can improve the performance of your network by removing that interference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[400,37,402,399,403,404,401,398],"class_list":["post-753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-802-11","tag-broadband","tag-channels","tag-networks","tag-overlap","tag-performance","tag-wi-fi","tag-wireless","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}